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MARCIA DUNN AP
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A Tokyo company aimed its own private lander at the moon Sunday, blasting off on a SpaceX rocket with the United Arab Emirates’ first lunar rover and toys from Japan Robot, designed to roll up in the gray dust.
The lander and its experiments will take nearly five months to reach the moon.
ispace designs ships that use the least amount of fuel to save money and leave more room for cargo. So it’s making its way to the Moon on a slow, low-energy journey, traveling 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth before returning to intersect with the Moon at the end of April.
By comparison, it took NASA’s Orion crew module and test dummy five days to reach the Moon last month. The lunar flyby mission ended with a thrilling splash in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday.
The ispace lander will target Atlas Crater on the northeast near side of the moon, which is more than 50 miles (87 kilometers) in diameter and just over a mile (2 kilometers) deep. The lander’s four legs stick out, reaching a height of more than 7 feet (2.3 meters).
With a scientific satellite orbiting Mars, the UAE also wants to explore the moon. Its probe, named Rashid after the royal family of Dubai, weighs just 22 pounds (10 kilograms) and will remain on the ground for about 10 days, like everything else on the mission.
Hamad AlMarzooqi, Emirates program manager, said landing on an unexplored part of the moon would yield “novel and extremely valuable” scientific data. Additionally, the lunar surface is an “ideal platform” for testing new technologies that could be used in eventual human expeditions to Mars.
Add to that national pride — the rover represents “a pioneering national effort in space and a historic moment that, if successful, would be the first mission to land on the lunar surface by the UAE and Arab countries,” he said in a subsequent statement. A statement said the takeoff.
Additionally, the lander is carrying an orange-sized sphere provided by the Japanese space agency that will transform into a wheeled robot on the moon. Also flying: solid-state batteries from Japan’s Spark Plug company; a flight computer from an Ottawa, Ontario company with artificial intelligence to identify geological features seen by a UAE rover; and a 360-degree camera from a Toronto-area company.
Riding on the rocket is a small NASA laser experiment that is now heading to the moon on its own to search for ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar south pole.
The ispace mission is called Hakuto, Japanese for White Rabbit. In Asian folklore, it is said that a white rabbit lived on the moon. Private companies are planning a second moon landing in 2024 and a third in 2025.
Founded in 2010, ispace is one of the finalists in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition to successfully land on the moon by 2018. The rover built by ispace has never been launched.
Another finalist is an Israeli nonprofit called SpaceIL, which successfully landed on the moon in 2019. But instead of a smooth landing, the Beresheet spacecraft slammed into the lunar surface and was destroyed.
With a predawn launch Sunday from the Cape Canaveral space station, ispace is now on track to become one of the first private entities to try and land on the moon. Although it won’t launch until early next year, a lunar lander built by Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology and Houston’s Intuitive Machines could beat ispace to the moon due to its shorter cruise time.
Only Russia, the United States and China have achieved so-called “soft landings” on the moon, starting with the former Soviet Union’s Luna 9 in 1966. Only the United States has sent astronauts to the lunar surface: 12 people have made 6 landings.
Sunday, December 11, 1972, marked the 50th anniversary of the last Moon landing by Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt.
NASA’s Apollo moon missions were all “excitement about technology,” said ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada, who was not yet alive. Now, “it’s the excitement of business.”
“This is the dawn of the lunar economy,” Hakamada noted during the SpaceX launch webcast. “Let’s go to the moon.”
Liftoff was supposed to happen two weeks ago, but was delayed by SpaceX for additional rocket inspections.
Eight minutes after launch, the recovered first-stage booster returned to Cape Canaveral under a nearly full moon, with twin sonic booms echoing across the night sky.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Division is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The Associated Press is solely responsible for all content.
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